While most people appreciate the importance of physical fitness, many have difficulty finding the motivation required to maintain a regular exercise program. Some people find it particularly difficult to maintain an exercise regimen that involves continuously repetitive motions, such as running, walking and bicycling. Experienced athletes and trainers have found that feedback provides many people with motivation to maintain a regular exercise program. When a person can directly experience the results provided by an exercise program, that person typically will be encouraged to continue exercising. Recently the use of athletic information monitoring devices as represented by the Nike-iPod™ system has become commonplace. Typically, an athletic information monitoring device will incorporate a sensor for measuring parameters relating to the person being monitored and a portable computing device attached to or carried by the person for processing the parameters measured by the remote device. In many cases the sensor and computing device share a wireless communication channel used for passing information between the remote device and the computing device. In order to establish the wireless communication channel a handshaking process (also referred to as pairing) is performed. The pairing process is typically triggered automatically the first time a remote device wirelessly receives a connection request from the computing device with which it is not yet paired.
Many experienced athletes and trainers also have found that competition may provide an even stronger motivation to maintain a regular exercise program. Some athletes, for example, will be more motivated to exercise when competing against a partner than by exercising alone. These athletes may, for example, exercise with a partner, enter into athletic contests such as races, or even just compare their current performance ability with a friend's. Unfortunately, in those situations where more than one remote device is within wireless range of the computing device, the connection request sent by the computing device can be received by more than the target remote device each of which can respond resulting in pairing with a remote device that is not the target remote device.
Therefore, system, method, and apparatus for intelligently pairing wireless devices are desirable.